Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you break up the individuals from a community into individual units, they become disempowered because it's the collective consciousness and the collective energy of the group from which power comes. The principal driving force that lies before us is that we have to recognize the nature of community as the evolutionary step that we just took a step backwards from in the last century.
This was Jace being brave. Simon thought, brave and snarky because he thought Lilith was going to kill him, and that was the way he wanted to go, unafraid and on his feet. Like a warrior. The way Shadowhunters did. His death song would always be this-jokes and snideness and pretend arrogance, and that look in his eyes that said 'I'm better than you'. Simon just hadn't realized it before.
The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves.
I had written eight drafts of the Lemony Snicket' screenplay when this changing-of-the-guard thing happened, and I said to the new producers, "I don't think I could write any more drafts." I guess I was sort of hoping they would say, "Well that's okay, this last one is perfect." But instead, they said, "It's funny you should say that. We don't think you can write any more drafts either."
If you're like most members of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income.
Everyone has some natural talent or aptitude in one or more areas. If you can identify those areas you not only will be happier and perform more successfully in that role, but you will also become better paid for that. Our free-market system pays for performance at some point. When you have a natural talent or aptitude, coupled with desire and experience, the result is productivity plus.
In 1967, in DeKalb v. DeSpain, a court (255 F.Supp. 655. N.D.Ill. 1966.) took a 4-line nursery rhyme used by a K-5 kindergarten class and declared the nursery rhyme unconstitutional. The court explained that although the word 'God' was not contained in this nursery rhyme, if someone were to hear the rhyme, he might think that it was talking about God - and that would be unconstitutional!
Leadership can't be claimed like luggage at the airport. Leadership can't be inherited, even though you may inherit a leadership position. And leadership can't be given as a gift - even if you've been blessed with an abundance of leadership skills to share with someone else. Leadership must be earned by mastering a defined set of skills and by working with others to achieve common goals.
Sooner or later there will be a nuclear 9/11 [by Islamic terrorists] in an American city or that of a US ally... A terrorist nuclear attack against an American city could take many forms. A worst case scenario would be the detonation of a nuclear device within a city. Depending upon the size and sophistication of the weapon, it could kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
I never have people tell me their stories. I usually have to figure them out myself. Because I know that if people tell me stories, they will expect them to be remembered. And I cannot guarantee that. There is no way to know if the stories stay after I'm gone. And how devastating would it be to confide in someone and have the confidence disappear? I don't want to be responsible for that.
She blinked, sat up, and saw Chris in the bathroom doorway. He'd just gotten out the shower. His hair was damp, and he was dressed only in his briefs. The sight of his thin, boyish body - all ribs and elbows and knees - pulled at her heart, for he looked so innocent and vulnerable. He was so small and fragile that she wondered how she could ever protect him, and renewed fear rose in her.
The worst fear in the hearings was that you would get some evil interrogator: you could never know what might happen then. No one who lives in a free country will ever understand that kind of fear. What is most horrifying is the realization that you have no idea what can happen, that your life is totally in the hands of someone in the chair in front of you, someone might well be a demon.
Products were once designed for the functions they performed. But when all companies can make products that perform their functions equally well, the distinctive advantage goes to those who provide pleasure and enjoyment while maintaining the power. If functions are equated with cognition, pleasure is equated with emotion; today we want products that appeal to both cognition and emotion.
Be alert as you watch a dog at play or at rest. Let the animal teach you to feel at home in the now, to celebrate life by being completely present. You just watch the tail ... with some dogs you just look at them - just a little look is enough - and their tail goes ...'Life is good! Life is good!' And they are not telling themselves a story of why life is good. It's a direct realization.
As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of reading I had as a kid - you know, where you climb in bed and read for hours and hours, and the book itself is this charged magical object. Later, when writing becomes your job, it's tied up with ego and all kinds of worry, and it's not always easy to get to that state of pure escape.
Father, I am from a different egg than your other children. Think of me as a duckling raised by hens. I am not a domestic bird destined to spend his life in a chicken coop. the water that scares you rejuvenates me. For unlike you I can swim, and swim I shall. The ocean is my homeland. If you are with me, come to the ocean. If not, stop interfering with me and go back to the chicken coop.
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
Beauty can only be best described at its origin through a befuddling silence, the kind that leaves one almost on the verge of a pleasurable death, just because one chooses beauty over life. There is nothing in this world to hold something so pure, so divine except a loving heart. And it is the only manner through which love recognises love; the language of love has no alphabet, no words.
All they do is warm their seats for their long tenures and eventually even their seats get dilapidated with the amount of money they hog in illegally and the only way it comes out is by tilting their huge pot-bellied frames to one side and emitting poisonous gases that not only depreciate their beloved seats but also the nation as a whole and then they shout 'Global Warming.' Hallelujah!
To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.
We are deceived if we think that mind and judgment are two different matters: judgment is but the extent of the light of the mind. This light penetrates to the bottom of matters; it remarks all that can be remarked, and perceives what appears imperceptible. Therefore we must agree that it is the extent of the light in the mind that produces all the effects which we attribute to judgment.
He loved me. He'd loved me as long as he he'd known me! I hadn't loved him as long perhaps, but now I loved him equally well, or better. I loved his laugh, his handwriting, his steady gaze, his honorableness, his freckles, his appreciation of my jokes, his hands, his determination that I should know the worst of him. And, most of all, shameful though it might be, I loved his love for me.
What's that smell?" I froze. What? Did I really smell so distasteful he had only to lean in my direction to catch a putrid whiff of me? I stayed the urge to break his freaking nose for pointing out my stinkiness. He sniffed again. "I can't place it." "How bad is it?" I asked, my cheeks heating. "It's good. Some kind of flower." My first thought: Hurray! I don't stink. My second: Ohmygod!
What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.
I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.
You don't really need to engage your visual sense, because the natural wiring of the human psyche is to monitor the environment through sound, not through sight. But we're convinced through modern conditions that we have to look at everything, and that creates stress in our life, because we're trying to solve problems in ways that are much more time consuming, not efficient, and not fun.
We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.
As he loves us, he would have us love others. We say men are not worthy of such friendships. True, they are not. Neither are we worthy of Christ's wondrous love for us. But Christ loves us-not according to our worthiness-but according to the riches of his own loving heart! So should it be with our giving of friendship-not as the person deserves-but after the measure of our own character.
Compassion arises naturally as the quivering of the heart in the face of pain, ours and another's. True compassion is not limited by the separateness of pity, nor by the fear of being overwhelmed. When we come to rest in the great heart of compassion, we discover a capacity to bear witness to, suffer with, and hold dear with our own vulnerable heart the sorrows and beauties of the world.
The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.
My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things.
NOOOO!" On the screen, a woman's eyes bugged almost out of her head, and I tried not to scream. Tried not to scream in exasperation, I mean. The serial killer was right in front of her, wide open! Clearly, instead of weeping like a moron, she could be lunging forward and administering a swift uppercut to the chin. Then this entire pointless ordeal would be over with, and I could go home.
I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.
Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found... That's out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year.... Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.
I don't believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds, I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for -- even if it's just a better tomorrow -- is the most powerful drug on this planet.
Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.
Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.
Augustus: “You probably need some rest.” Me: “I’m okay.” Augustus: “Okay.” (Pause.) “What are you thinking about?” Me: “You.” Augustus: “What about me?” Me: “‘I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.’” Augustus: “God, you are sexy.” Me: “We could go to your room.” Augustus: “I’ve heard worse ideas.
[Jew] didn't believe anything good could come out of a Jewish study. So, what has happened is anti-Semitism has cost the Jews their lives and their property. It's also cost the Christians the ability to read the old gospels, which are deeply, deeply Jewish, and to bring that out is a pretty exciting thing. I'm having a wonderful time with that. I'm just not near ready to do much with it.
Magic is a sudden opening of the mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited views that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us; that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts.
Not many people are willing to give failure a second opportunity. They fail once and it is all over. The bitter pill of failure is often more than most people can handle. If you are willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you are willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you have got the essential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces.
Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!
Build creative cultures, and work with purpose to unleash the creativity of your team. Creativity is the most valuable natural resource in any organization, yet it is often a resource that is largely untapped. The leaders that prioritize and invest in creative cultures will be the wall street darlings of tomorrow. In fact, they're the darlings of today (Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn, etc).
The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you.
He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he's on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. "Who am I?" "Jericho" "Who are you?" He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He's commando tonight. My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: "Whogivesafuck?
Dani, Dani, Dani." I flinch. I've never heard anyone say my name so gently. It creeps me all kinds of out. He's towering over me, arms crossed over his chest, scarred forearms dark against the rolled-up sleeves of a crisp white shirt. Heavy silver cuffs glint at both wrists. The light is smack behind his head, as usual. "You didn't really think I'd let you get away with it," Ryodan says.
the habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.
There is nothing that you can do to change the present moment. It simply is. You may be able to change the situation one second, one minute, one hour, or one day from now, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to change the way things are right here and now. By not getting irritated you will be more effective in doing what needs to be done to change the situation for the next moment.
I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it.